zeroday

This report completely missed why many Marxists refer to China as the CPC vs the colloquial CCP. They say CPC because the "Communist Party" part of it comes before the nation, as a symbolic way to reject nationalism in favor of internationalism.

I think the author of this paper would have benefited from talking to the hardline leftists and asking them their thoughts rather than trying to analyze them from the outside. Most of the time, if you ask someone in good faith why they believe what they believe, they'll honestly answer out of a desire to be understood.

I don't have to agree with right wingers on everything in order to agree that these rich parasites need to go.

I'm curious, what do you mean when you say "tankie"? It's a word that's used to mean so many different things these days

Even if it was fake, this manifesto makes a good point. We, as a people, would have far less miserable lives if every CEO in the Fortune 500 and billionaire dropped dead tomorrow. Just saying, we'd be way better off with them dead, and we all know it. Left, right, doesn't matter. If you know the pain of being exploited by these rich fucks then we've got an enemy in common.

When someone else kills a CEO we need to do everything we can to hide them, aid them, and celebrate them as our heroes in this war.

I'm not normally one for conspiracy theories, but there's a massive motivation for the US government to find anyone who looks about right and is disgruntled and then frame them, or plant evidence on someone they found through an illegal means. The US surveillance state uses parallel construction all the time to hide the actual (often illegal) ways they find someone.

Plus, if you don't have a suspect, the message to all the proles out there is that you can kill CEOs and get away with it. The internet just showed that the only reason the working class aren't doing The Purge on CEOs is fear of consequences. That's a critical threat to the ruling class, and they will 100% frame, pay to take the fall or blackmail someone into it rather than not convict somebody.

It doesn't line up at all that he brought a handwritten copy of his manifesto plus his fake IDs and his recently used murder weapon to a Macdonalds. Especially after being careful about escaping the city, and the amount of practice he had to smoothly clear the jams when he shot Thompson shows this was premeditated.

Unless he takes the jury stand and uses it to verbally blast the ruling class and try to incite more violence, this ain't the shooter IMO.

It'd be fun to watch, it'd be engaging to the crowd, and it'd terrorize capitalists. Especially with real-time updates, imagine a CEO doing a press release and then having their bounty skyrocket as people hear the news.

I've got a story idea for a cyberpunk dystopia. Imagine a world almost identical to ours. In that world, some inventive person creates a darknet website that allows anonymous donations to put bounties on corporate executives. Now, this site's creator wants to make sure their site isn't misused, so they implement guardrails like "Targets would be required to have over $10M in assets" and "each crypto wallet may contribute a maximum of $5 so it better reflects the will of the people."

Then, the site admin adds betting options like "who reaches a $1M bounty first", over/under odds, betting on which target gets whacked first, etc, in order to draw traffic to the site. Maybe there'd also be a percentage of the bounty that's paid out to organizations working to heal the damage caused by the target, so for example if a fossil-fuel exec gets whacked then that percentage goes to orgs working to stop fossil fuels.

How do you think it'd play out in this story? Would the site properly incentivize people to shoot up boardrooms rather than schools?

Oh lol, that's weird, I thought it was common knowledge that China censors some types of speech, similarly to every other nation. If I was running a state, I'd want to censor transphobic slurs, arguments for gender inequality, pro-Capitalist propaganda, racism, etc. IMO there's nothing inherently morally wrong about censorship, and I see a lot of think pieces from US / NATO outlets like Voice of America yelling that China is bad because it censors speech, without giving any context or nuance about what type of speech is being censored and also distracting from the US's massive censorship.

On the oppression point - I guess it mostly matters who's getting oppressed. If it's regular working people being oppressed, fuck that, but if we implemented policies as a society that forced billionaires to give up their wealth I'm sure they'd cry about being "oppressed". I don't have any sympathy for the cries of CEOs and mega-landlords about how they're being oppressed by being forced to give back their stolen wealth.

So I've been thinking about this for a bit. Yeah, fuck countries, nation states, etc. Power should be at the level of communities of workers, similar to how the original Soviet system was before it got so fucked up.

Tbh I think we'll just have to agree to disagree, I think wealth should be redistributed by force because I believe that the rich won't redistribute it otherwise. But I can respect where you're coming from - I wish it wasn't necessary but I just don't have faith that the rich will do it out of their own free will and kindness of heart. Also, even more than the local rich we need to expropriate the wealth of the billionaires and other shitheads that just suck the money out of areas and people, leaving them destroyed.

Also - what happens when the community is full of bigots? Like let's take Odessa TX, where they've just functionally banned trans people from using their correct bathroom. The community there decided on that, does that make it right? There's a similar argument with what happens when you've got a community of racist white people who decide that all POC are less than their equals.

Actually, the opinion I see most often on .ml is that modern day Russia sucks, and is bad because they've turned into a capitalist warmongering empire similar to the US. People are pretty mixed on China, but legit if you just look at the technological advances coming out of China - just verified stuff that's been scientifically proven and then deployed - it's pretty impressive, especially surrounding batteries. So, if you're suspicious of China then any good news about China will come off as a conspiracy, but in reality things are pretty mixed and there's a lot of good and bad about nations, and no one state is all good or all bad. Anyone reducing the complexity of geopolitics down to one nation = good / other nation = bad is either dumb, trolling, not speaking in good faith, indoctrinated or just repeating propaganda.

First of all, yes, we're living under a shitty authoritarian government in the US. It's basically a dictatorship of the richest in society. I want to invert that, where the workers have all the power. It'll flatten out the power hierarchy eventually because everyone will become workers like everyone else. Just, in order to get there, we've gotta do some things which will smack of authoritarianism, such as forcibly redistributing wealth and converting businesses to being worker-owned.

I don't know what's best for people, other than that we should make society more democratic. But thing is, we can't let everyone act in their own self interest when doing so harms others. Like, it's in a landlord's individual self interest to charge as much money as possible and to refuse to redistribute their property.

Also, if you let everyone act in their own self interest, how do we solve the problem of getting land back to indigenous populations? For example, I'm certain that many white people in the US won't want to give land back, and there could be a democratic majority that opposes doing the right thing. What do we do then?